Nescire aude.

January 23, 2010

Dreyfus, "Refocusing the question": By parody of reasoning, one could argue that, since beginning bicycle riders can only stay upright by using training wheels, when they finally manage to ride without training wheels, we should conclude they must then be using invisible ones, and the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks otherwise.

Encountering this sentence is almost unbearable for me. People do make mistakes, and this might be one. But even if it is a mistake, it's a happy one (like many occurrences of "inciteful"), and Dreyfus could just be being clever—this is a parody of the reasoning in question. But you can't tell. It's completely dry and nothing else in the paper smells of jokiness. The charitable thing would just be to assume that it's intentional, of course. But I can't let it lie.

January 19, 2010

I suppose the unspooling title-related plan has come to a premature end. However! Re-reading bits of The Structure of Behavior (since it is impossible for me to retain anything on a first reading, especially if it's not guided by a fairly specific purpose) I am again struck by the resemblance of the arguments of the "Vital Structures" chapter to those in "The Representation of Life" (though as one might expect some things which Thompson emphasizes are not emphasized by M-P, and some things which Merleau-Ponty emphasizes are not emphasized by T—and there is an out-of-place reference to statistical frequency which is, however, not actually essential).

The internet reveals to me what is not terribly surprising given what I've read about about him, namely, that JJ Gibson was influenced by Merleau-Ponty.

January 13, 2010

Since I had reason to obtain, once more, Having Thought from the library, and did so, I decided to re-read "Pattern and Being", since it's so butt-ass good. Which, in turn, caused me to notice something prima facie strange about Dennett's chess-playing setup, namely, that he imagines a UTM running a chess-playing program and then, in a further move, being configured so as to play against itself. But the second provision is unnecessary—you can't play chess against a chess-playing Turing machine! Turing machines don't accept input from their environment; everything's got to be there in the state transitions and the symbols initially on the tape. But if that's how you're thinking of it calling it a chess-playing Turing machine seems mostly a courtesy; wouldn't it be better to call it a winner-determining Turing machine? You give it (taking the processing routines as a given, though you'd also have to give those to a UTM) the initial board state, and when it halts the final state symbol tells you whether white won, lost, or drew. So maybe we're supposed to think of the machine as being more like a chess-stepper: it takes you from one complete game state description[1] to another, the difference being a move (and whatever else needs updated), or some extra output possibilities to indicate resignation, victory, a draw, whatever. Then you could give it an initial description, wait for it to make its move, reconstruct from the symbols now on the tape what the new game state is, and then (after deciding on your move) recode the new state on the tape and start over. If you had it set up to output its own listing prior to the game state, such that its output could also be its input, you could feed it back into itself, I suppose (though finite tapes would make it tricky). I have a hard time seeing at this point why anything other than the output (/input) tape configurations should have anything recognizable (likely only by a superhuman, but nevermind that) as, or adhering to the rules regarding, chess pieces or positions, and those will be vanishingly few, compared to the huge number of intermediary tape configurations: which means that without meaning to I've made the same complaint I made before. So let's all ignore that and focus instead on the marvel of wasted time that is this C to Brainfuck compiler, which is actually barely functional even when considering the limited subset of C that could be implemented in Brainfuck but still an impressively bizarre undertaking, something that seems less understandable to me than writing a Brainfuck compiler in Brainfuck, which has of course also been done.

[1] not a description of a game from start to finish, obviously, but a complete description of the game at a turn: board layout, whose move it is, what the last move was (or some other means of determining if a capture en passant is legal), what rooks and kings have moved, number of consecutive alternating repeated board positions, whatever else is involved.

January 11, 2010

John Annett has more than one article with the title "On knowing how to do things" (though to be marginally fair one of them has the postcolonic subtitle "a theory of motor imagery")—this does not seem like the most helpful way to proceed to me, but, having read only the second, I'm in no position to dispute the accuracy of the titles, and in this area it probably is a virtue of titles to reflect the contents of the items to which they're attached. In any case: from the subtitled essay I draw an interesting task. With your hands held still (it helps to have your arms before you and each hand holding the other), and trying not to move other parts of your body to the extent that that is compatible with speaking, describe how you to tie your shoes.[1] This is surprisingly difficult (or at least I found it so) compared to doing the same thing with hand movement, even if you're not allowed to accompany your movements with the instruction "go like this". Not only difficult to give the description, but difficult to suppress motion, and frustrating too.

[1] Now that I go back and check the article, I see that he was actually talking about tying a bow, not shoelaces, and that he discusses this further in the other same-named article!

Two extremes (geddit?) of metal reviewing, both concerning VA's Wrnlrd. Of the first all that is necessary to read is the phrase "pukage of winter guitarscapes" (how enticing!); the second, by omnipresent Voegtlin (also a writer for Stylus and Dusted) is presented, absurdly, as an image, so that copying and pasting is not possible: but that's ok, since one should really read (as they say) the whole thing.